Me and my team were selected for the first ever India Singapore Hackathon that took place in November, 2018. The hackathon was held in the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It was a great initiative and effort by All India Council For Technical Education (AICTE) and our Honorable Prime Minister to bring together the teams from both the countries to work on problems common to both the nations and also the whole globe.
It all started from the Smart India Hackathon that took place in Udaipur in the month of March, 2018. Me and my team secured the Third Place in the hackathon at that time. Smart India Hackathon is a National Level Hackathon in which teams from all over India participate to solve problems faced by different ministries of the Government of India. Every ministry(Railway, Health, Transport etc) releases several problem statements and participants are shortlisted accordingly. We were selected to tackle a problem for the Ministry of Railways. That's all about the short description of the Smart India Hackathon.
After about 7 months I received a mail regarding the procedure for the selection of the teams in the first ever India-Singapore Hackathon that will take place in Singapore in the month of November. It appeared a spam mail to us at first sight and sensibly we ignored it. But after some time we got the follow up mails and the dates for the online interview. Eventually after juggling through the tests and interview that took place we got selected in the TOP 20 TEAMS to represent INDIA at the International Hackathon in Singapore!
Students have multiple email addresses and often uses different private emails to register for events making it hard to track. We needed to provide a smart solution to unify the digital identity for better attendance tracking. We searched more about the problem and found more cases where the solution is indeed needed:
We made a prototype for 'Shared Digital Identity Verification' using Blockchain(Hyperledger Fabric) and Facial Recognition. Blockchain provides with immutability as the major feature along with decentralisation and facial recognition helped us to uniquely identify individuals. Every user has a unique ID associated with their face. Every time the user attends an event or updates his information, the change is recorded corresponding to the user ID in the blockchain database. We can then use analytics on the user generated data to know more about the user data validity and also it's authenticity. This can be used to decentralise the identity of an individual for mega events(e.g college festivals or large concerts) and serves various advantages.
That's all about the overview of the problem and solution that we proposed. It was a great learning experience to compete with the best hacker minds from all over the India and also Singapore. It wouldn't have been possible without the mentorship from our Research and Development Head Dr. Faruk Kazi! My team mates Siddhesh, Shreyas and Yash worked hard consistently for this promising solution!
Github Repository : https://github.com/ashish230897/India-Singapore-Hackathon-Team-RangersZ